


cicatrix

by veranear



Category: Given (Anime), Given (Manga)
Genre: Akihiko POV, Gen, Introspection/Character Study, M/M, Meta, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29777034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veranear/pseuds/veranear
Summary: "These days, he walks around Tokyo with a certain frustration. Murata has left Japan for parts unknown, leaving a million of his messy, poorly maintained, half-shattered, all-but-antique things strewn all over every place he’d ever been, and it seems that not a single person in the entire city of Tokyo—not on the crosswalks of Shibuya, the cafes of Omotesandō, Given’s Shimo-Kitazawa studio or the classrooms of Tokyo Gakugei—seems to be tripping over them except Kaji himself."--The music that remains is too loud. A brief history of not and/or never getting over your first love.
Relationships: Kaji Akihiko/Murata Ugetsu, Kaji Akihiko/Nakayama Haruki
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	cicatrix

**Author's Note:**

> Just…dealing with movie feelings. The song mentioned by Mafuyu in this fic isn’t canon, it’s something I made up.

These days, he walks around Tokyo with a certain frustration. Murata has left Japan for parts unknown, leaving a million of his messy, poorly maintained, half-shattered, all-but-antique things strewn all over every place he’d ever been, and it seems that not a single person in the entire city of Tokyo—not on the crosswalks of Shibuya, the cafes of Omotesandō, Given’s Shimo-Kitazawa studio or the classrooms of Tokyo Gakugei—seems to be tripping over them except Kaji himself. Kaji trips over them at Yoyogi Park, where Murata had once forced him to go watch autumn leaves falling over a bridge, he trips over them in the upstairs third music room at the university where Murata, frankly speaking, had spent very little time, because he was usually skipping, he trips over them even at the KFC around the corner from school, where Murata had made him come just the once, at 2am, because Murata was drunk and left his credit card in a cab. All Kaji wants is a quick bucket of chicken before heading home from a hectic job.

Even his car trips over them on the roads to and from the concert halls where he and Murata had once performed, alone and together. The tires skid dangerously and his vision swarms and for a second he’s sure he’s going to cause a traffic incident—and then it all vanishes, as quickly as it had come.

The rational part in the back of mind informs him, _Well, obviously. it’s because no one else in the city of Tokyo was in love with him._

But that just reminds Kaji that he was the very first person who had ever loved Murata, and, knowing Murata, Kaji might very well be the last. Ever. That second thought is so unwieldy to entertain that the minute he thinks of it, his entire chest constricts so tight that he has to force a series of very loud, very violent coughs in order to dissipate the feeling. The girl sitting next to him on the train—because it’s usually on the train that he thinks of these things, and it’s usually a girl sitting next to him—gets up, pulling her mask tighter around her ears, and goes to hold a handrail instead.

The collection of Murata-things around Tokyo grows bigger.

The first apartment he and Haruki move into together, about six months into their budding relationship, triggered both by the discovery of mold at Kaji’s place and by the desire to move on more quickly into their bright and shining future as a proper couple, is a one bedroom in Setagaya, a fifth floor apartment that resembles neither of their former places very much. It has a view onto a relatively quiet intersection, a bright living room, an open kitchen with a bar that separates cooking and living space, and a bedroom with a floor to ceiling window. The rent is as cheap as it gets in this part of town, and it’s just a minute away from the commuter train which takes them to anywhere in Tokyo they could possibly want to go. At the very end of the hall is a bathroom. Even though it's high afternoon, it's already dark in there, the area over the sink and toilet swathed with shadows. All the way near the ceiling, in a place Kaji couldn’t reach even if he were to stand on a step stool, are a series of very high, very small windows. 

Obviously, when he sees those windows, he wants to die, but for Haruki’s sake and the sake of the real estate agent, he keeps it together. The real estate agent is going on and on about the convenience of the commute, how rare it is for a place to be vacant in this part of town that is relatively new, giving them a blessed rental number that Kaji knows is going to impossible to refuse, and all Kaji can think is:

Murata is now leaving things even in Kaji’s own home. Worse, he’s leaving things in the home Kaji shares with Haruki.

Yatake, when he visits, claps Haruki on the back three times enthusiastically and congratulates them (Haruki in particular, he doesn't look at or acknowledge Kaji’s presence) for being one of the few fortunate bastards in all of Tokyo who actually has ventilation in their bathroom.

“You guys really do have all the luck.”

He says the word luck like he’s saying…well, a word that rhymes with luck. He's facing towards the living room, and Kaji is looking at his sideburns, today buzzed a little messier and less evenly than usual. Whenever Yatake has to see both Haruki and Kaji at the same time, he’s always in a slight bit of disarray, and Kaji, having observed Yatake interact with Haruki for a while now, understands the reason better than Yatake probably thinks he does. He probably understands the reason better than Yatake himself does.

The image of those sideburns is pretty familiar to Kaji, at this point. Even now, Yatake never looks Kaji completely in the face. He’s always at an at least 90-degree angle when he speaks to Kaji, in the rare times he chooses to speak to Kaji at all, and the smile on his face looks like someone drew it on a piece of paper and tacked it on between his cheeks. It's as if the minute he makes eye contact with Kaji—and god forbid that contact conveys anything friendly or conciliatory—Kaji will immediately abandon this house, abandon Haruki, jump in bed with a stranger he picked up from a bar and break his best friend’s heart. As if his continued disdain is the only bastion of protection keeping Kaji’s insidiousness at bay.

It’s usually Haruki who initiates sex. For obvious reasons, Kaji doesn’t as much as he can help it, and just waits for Haruki to eventually find him in bed or on the couch or half-naked in the kitchen, flipping eggs, and, shyly, start kissing Kaji in places lower than just his mouth. Even after six months together, most of their intimate activity from Haruki’s end can be described as either “shyly” or “reverently,” which is something Kaji had somewhat expected, though not to the degree that it actually happens.

This isn’t something Kaji can talk to Haruki about, or should. He wants to say, “You don’t have to act like I’m god incarnate himself. I’m the one who barely deserves you,” but a conversation like that with Haruki would get them absolutely nowhere. 1) It’s not nice, now that they’re steadily dating, to continue to emphasize the disequilibrium from which their relationship was born 2) It would upset Haruki and force him into a defensive position, from which he would refute vehemently until his throat went dry and 3) telling someone you don’t deserve them while they’re madly in love with you is actually an incredibly unfair thing to do. The only option for the person madly in love is to sink into a quagmire of complicated emotions like sympathy, tenderness, pity, guilt, even more love, and the last thing Kaji wants to do is overwhelm Haruki.

Haruki already seems overwhelmed enough as it is.

So he sleeps with Haruki and tries to reciprocate what he’s given, always, and when the opportunity comes to give more, he immediately takes it. This doesn’t always succeed. When he tries to give more, Haruki then tries to give _even_ more, which prompts Kaji to try and give more on top of that, and the entire experience becomes like two older Asian relatives fighting over the dinner bill.

It isn’t to say there aren’t good times—wonderful times—but he could probably describe their entire relationship like that.

Part of the issue is, during that winter-spring—after he left Murata in that alleyway, before he reunited with Haruki on a park bench—Kaji hadn’t actually become a better man. The thing is that Kaji had always been a perfectly good man. For a few years he had been a perfectly good man trapped in a vicious and unrelenting game, within which he had to play by rules that forced him into all sorts of unholy activities, but it isn’t as if his soul had been corrupted or something. He didn’t _enjoy_ the sex friends; they were a necessity. It isn’t as though he thought: this is a perfectly appropriate way to conduct my life. He still had the same sense of integrity, the same sense of loyalty, and all he was doing was waiting for a clear day, at last, during which he could finally walk above ground into the open air and be that person again.

The issue was never about goodness. The issue was: Can I fall out of love with Murata for long enough for find my senses again and be a clear-headed human being for longer than one hour at a time? Can I do it soon enough, with enough absoluteness, that I can reciprocate another love I’m being given?

In that way, “a good man” was always a euphemism. A euphemism to protect Haruki. A euphemism to delude himself.

Kaji eventually concedes that there might be one single other person in Tokyo who is—mind you, not to the degree that he is, but still—also sort of tripping on Murata’s things. The thing about Mafuyu is that in order to understand anything about him, you have to watch him very, very closely, paying religious attention the things he does and says, even the way he moves, but once you watch for long enough, with enough attentiveness, you’ll come to understand almost everything about him. This is pretty much Uenoyama Ritsuka’s manual of operations, though sometimes Uenoyama lets that attention slip for reasons that both are and aren’t his fault, and gaps emerge. The Rosetta stone for Mafuyu’s emotions is written in near-invisible ink on his skin, but it’s encyclopedic in its coverage.

On the day that Murata sends his hilariously brief and impersonal text to all the members of the Given circle— _I am leaving Japan, thank you for taking care of me when I was here—_ Mafuyu arrives indecently early to the studio. The only reason Kaji knows this is because he, too, arrives indecently early to the studio. There had been no reason to sit at home and stew on the group text he had just received, let alone stew on it together with Haruki while Haruki made a late lunch and every once in a while eyed Kaji meaningfully.

Kaji greets Mafuyu normally—“Yo, Mafuyu,” and Mafuyu says, “Hi, Kaji-san,” then looks at him and away three times in quick succession, which in Mafuyu-language means there’s something he’s slightly hesitant to—but nonetheless will—say. Kaji waits.

“I think it might have been my fault.”

Kaji wants to explain to Mafuyu that 99% of things that happen with Murata is _not_ the other person’s fault, though, irritatingly, it’s also rarely Murata’s fault, either—or it _is_ his fault, but in way that cannot be helped, in a cosmic sense. He would tell Mafuyu this, but ultimately he knows it’s likely to achieve nothing except further confound and distress Mafuyu.

“Why do you think that?”

“I wrote _Ano Machi, Kono Machi_ for Ugetsu. In it, I was trying to tell him, ‘there’s always a town for you, even if you can’t forget.’ I didn’t mean it literally. He said he always listened to what I told him in the songs.”

This is the first time Mafuyu has said Murata’s name out loud to Kaji since long before, and in that moment Kaji discovers that somewhere along the way, “Ugetsu-san” had become “Ugetsu.”

“If he wanted to go,” Kaji says as gently as possible, “he would’ve gone regardless. It wouldn’t have been because of the song.”

Mafuyu’s sitting with his legs crossed, looking down at the back of his phone. It’s a posture he rarely assumes anymore, not since Uenoyama entered his life and Mafuyu’s started to lift his head up all the time, his gaze always somewhere at the level of Uenoyama’s eyes. He does this even when Uenoyama isn’t actually there, so it’s like he’s always looking at an apparition of Uenoyama in every room, on every crosswalk.

“Was first love really that fun, Kaji-san?”

“What do you mean, Mafuyu?”

Mafuyu’s using a sad voice that both pities Kaji and begs Kaji to understand Mafuyu’s own sadness.

“Ugetsu said that his first love was so fun. Was yours?”

Kaji goes into the bathroom to throw up. In all the millions of hours in the past half-decade of his life he’d spent thinking about his relationship with Murata, the word “fun” never once crossed his mind. Thinking about it now, he thinks it’d be probably be penultimate on the list of things he had ever felt, scoring only above “tranquil.” Even if he forces himself to go all the way back to the beginning, what he mostly remembers is Murata nagging him, demanding things of him, teasing him mercilessly, getting him into all sorts of exasperating situations—things which he had endured with the kind of fondness one feels for an irritating but deeply beloved pet—all while he looked upon Murata’s body with a continent-drowning amount of sympathy, envy, and love. None of it had been fun at all.

But, of course, that’s not why he throws up. He doesn’t throw up because the idea of their love being fun is so utterly contrary to anything his body has internalized about that relationship in the past several years. He throws up because it took Satou Mafuyu obliquely talking to Kaji about Murata in a recording-studio break room, nine months after Kaji left him forever, nine hours after Murata left the country forever, three years after their relationship disintegrated irreparably—forever—for Kaji to finally learn how Murata Ugetsu had felt being with Kaji Akihiko.

“It had been so fun.”

Every once in a while, he goes back into the basement of Murata’s house, lies on the bed, and pulls the sheets to him. It isn’t like he’s imagining Murata there—it’s just the sheets. For the longest time, this place was home. He honestly didn’t care how dark it was. He doesn’t give a shit about fireworks, when it comes down to it. What he gives a shit about is feeling a love so intense it’ll split you open at the seams. What he gives a shit about is what he felt that one time, listening to Brahms on the violin. What he gives a shit about is a connection so deeply tied to music, his own coming-of-age, that entire part of his identity which had been formed by a single embrace in a high school music room, it’s like the way a child is tied to the umbilical. The severing is a death of sorts—the destruction of a precious, singular knot that can never be tied up again once broken.

Sure, it’s ultimately a good thing, sure, you couldn’t have stayed in that womb forever, sure, you’ll eventually grow up to be your own person and everybody seals up and heals, but for a long, long night, all you want to do is scream and cry and kick every single one of your useless limbs into the air at how suddenly cold, suddenly terrifying, suddenly foreign the world had become.

Eventually, Kaji knows, he will hit a wall. He can already sense it coming up. When that day comes, he’ll finally find the courage to tell Haruki that this isn’t right for either of them, and then he will go out into the world—either to find Murata again, or to find a soundproofed room within which he can metaphorically sit for for five or so years, not dating anyone, not even thinking about or coming near the possibility of dating anyone, until he completely, finally, and utterly forgets.

He's not sure which, if either, would make him happy.

**Author's Note:**

> rambly author’s note: It is but a trifle of a thing, but this is my first ever fic!! Thanks for dropping by <3 This is not in a style I usually write in, but the whole point of my 2021 “write fiction endeavor” is that I feel all my writing has been work-related lately and getting stale, so I’m branching out. My first ever fic was *supposed* to be a much longer piece, but as I was working on that, all of this stuff hit me like a fever dream, so here we are: slightly less triumphant, but still glad I accomplished my 2021 goal of expanding my horizons a little.
> 
> Re: this pairing--Gusari writes them like it’s truly the love you can never recover from T__T From which moving on is never really moving on T__T Dawn will break but night will come again too T__T I’m pretty boring when it comes to irl romance, so being in the shoes of Aki & Ugetsu for a while really took me to some crazy places I’d never been before. It’s been fun. Only Gusari has the magic to get me out of my “compatibility is more important than chemistry in relationships” thing and get me rooting for these two.


End file.
